The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (20 page)

We went to see Rosalita with two pies, a plate of hot biscuits, and four pints of green tomato pickles. Rosalita ate a piece of pie just to humor Blossom and then felt better for it. She felt
so much better, in fact, that she crawled into Blossom's arms and buried her face in the warm, vanilla-scented softness of Blossom's neck and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Blossom rocked her gently and let her cry.

“Oh, my baby,” Blossom crooned into Rosalita's hair. “Oh, my poor, poor baby.”

I heard Bertie whimpering from her cradle and went to get her and hold her in my arms. She was a serious baby with quizzical eyes. “It's going to be okay,” I whispered to her, but she just looked silently back at me. I walked with her back and forth across the room, slowly swaying from side to side. “Hush, little baby, don't say a word,” I sang to her. “Josie's gonna buy you a mockingbird . . . .”

We stayed a long time and left them asleep next to each other in Tom's old iron bed.

For a while after that, Blossom and I went by the house almost every evening after dinner. Blossom would sit at the kitchen table with Rosalita and drink cups of coffee and talk. I walked back and forth, back and forth across the living-room floor holding Bertie in my arms and singing every old lullaby I could think of. At first, I could remember only two or three, and I would have to sing the same ones over and over again, but eventually others started to come back to me, and I could go on and on for quite a while before I had to repeat myself. It was strange to think that my mother must have once sung these songs to me, held me in her arms like I held Bertie. I couldn't remember it, but the songs were all there, slowly making their way up out of my memory, so it must have been true.

Sometimes Bertie was wide awake and would watch my eyes intently, looking serious, like someone trying to understand Greek when they spoke only French. Other times, she would fall asleep right away, and the tender, translucent lids would cover
her eyes and her long golden eyelashes would lie on her cheeks like butterfly wings, and I would keep walking back and forth so as not to wake her.

I came home to find Danny sitting on the couch, watching TV and drinking beer.

“You've been gone a long time,” he said. “A suspicious man would be suspicious.”

“I've been with Rosalita and the baby. You know you don't need to be suspicious.”

He sighed. “I know it,” he said, his eyes on the TV.

“The baby is sweet,” I said. And then when he didn't answer, “Don't you like babies?”

“I like babies fine—as long as they belong to someone else.”

“They smell so sweet.”

“Their diapers don't.”

“And Bertie has the sweetest little baby fingers and little baby toes and little baby mouth.”

“The better to scream the house down with, Red Riding Hood.”

“You sure are grumpy tonight.”

“I'm not grumpy. I'm just bored. I've been waiting here for you. Let's go out and have some fun. Let's find some people and stay up all night together and have a good time.”

“Oh, honey, I'm beat and I've got to get up early tomorrow to open the store.”

He didn't say anything for a minute.

“Suit yourself,” he finally said. “I'll be back when I'm back.”

After he left, the house was too quiet, and even though I went right to bed, I didn't fall asleep for the longest time.

The shot glasses at Tia's had white lines going all the way around them about half an inch down from the rim. When the bartenders poured shots of tequila for ordinary customers, they filled the glasses to the white line. When they poured shots for us, they filled the glasses to the brim. Some of us drank tequila with lime and salt that we licked off the curve between the thumb and forefinger. But most of us didn't bother with that. We just knocked the shots back in one gulp, without ceremony. People settling in for the evening would slow themselves down by drinking a beer between shots of tequila. It was possible to build up an amazing tolerance, but you had to work at it steadily.

But people who wanted to reach oblivion more quickly could sit at the bar at Tia's and drink tequila so fast that by the time they started to feel it, they had already had enough to knock them out. Unconsciousness could be a relief sometimes. And there was always someone around who would take you home and sling you into your bed—or near enough to it.

Danny and I started to argue more and more that spring. The more we argued, the more tequila seemed to me to be a good escape.

“Ease up, sugar,” Danny said to me. “You're drinking like your own ghost is chasing you.”

“I want to go fast,” I said. “I want to be there already now.”

“You need to slow down some—just take it easy and make it last. Let's just enjoy the evening.”

“Why? Why do I have to slow down? Why don't you speed up instead?”

“Life doesn't have to be as hard as you make it, Josie. You'd be happier if you would just take it as it comes. You would be happier if you would just relax.”

“I think
you
would be the one who would be happier if I would just relax.”

He laughed. “You say it like it's a bad thing. Don't you want me to be happy?”

“All I want right now is not to have to think about anything anymore or feel anything anymore or want anything anymore.”

“Oh, sugar, be very, very careful what you wish for.”

“I'm not too interested, as a rule, in being careful. You should know that by now. I'm the same person I've always been.”

“Are you?” he said, grabbing my hand.

“Oh, Lord,” I said. “Don't start. This conversation is starting to bore the crap out of me.”

“You and me both,” he sighed. “I'm worn out and I guess I'm just going home. Do you want to come?”

I went home with him, but I fell asleep before he came to bed, and when I woke up in the morning, he was already gone.

“You're gone an awful lot,” I said to Danny, “and you're not always at work. Who are you spending all this time with? Is there someone else?”

“God, I hate suspicious women! Of course, there's not someone else.”

There was someone else. Her name was Tawni, and she was pretty in the same way my cousin Belle was. It wasn't that Danny flirted with her at the bar at the café—it was that he so pointedly didn't. And that she was always there these days. And that she seemed so obviously conscious of me whenever I was around.
And that I got the feeling I was interrupting something.

The most fun part of figuring out that the relationship you had managed to fool yourself into thinking might, against all odds, last forever, but was now over, was getting to choose between being a harpy and being a doormat. I myself alternated between the two, to stunningly schizophrenic effect. Danny took to staying out late—even by his standards—which meant that I didn't see him at all most nights. I would sometimes find him asleep in bed when I came home from the bookstore in the late afternoons and would sometimes
not
find him, but would go and feel his toothbrush in the bathroom to see if it was damp, if maybe he had been home and gone.

When he was home, we circled around the same argument.

“I never lied to you,” Danny said. “I never made promises.”

“You did!” I screamed. “You made me believe things that weren't true!”

“I never said them!”

“You can say things without using words!”

“I'm not going to have this conversation with you!” he shouted, and then slammed the door and was gone.

The house in the woods was cold and lonesome without him, and I went back to spending my evenings keeping Rafi company down in the Cave. Pancho sat next to me from time to time and just shook his head sorrowfully.

“It'll pass, honey,” Rafi would say, pushing another free beer my way. He was trying his best to keep me continuously drunk. For medicinal reasons.

“Oh, Rafi,” I would say. “The weeks go on and on.”

I wanted it to be done. I knew the end of me and Danny was inevitable. But the truth, of course, is that just because some new girl comes along, it doesn't mean that you stop loving the girl you live with, that you stop sleeping next to her (sometimes)
or passing her in the kitchen in the late-afternoon light, seeing all the little pieces of her you fell in love with in the first place. You can still be tender to her and share secrets with her and love her, the whole time you're betraying her. The problem isn't that now there's a new girl—the problem is that now there are
two
girls, and the one you love the most is the one you're going to hurt. The new girl, well, she's
new.
And the old girl, the one whose secrets you already know so well, the one you've loved a long time now, she doesn't stand a chance. (“Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arms.”)

I knew all that. Knowledge, however, did not make me any more reconciled to the facts. Knowledge did not make me reasonable or serene.

Danny and I didn't even fight anymore at the end. “We've already had every fight there is to be had,” Danny said.